From the Editor

In the heyday of Lynchburg’s canal era, steamboats were banned from the upper James River. The turbulence they created was damaging the canal banks. “In addition,” writes Gibson Hobbs, “horse-drawn boats frequently engaged in illegal races with these steam-powered competitors, causing even more damage.”
Flipping through the pages of this issue, I can’t help but believe that there is a primal impatient energy loose in the world, a reckless competitive urge, a novelty-seeking “thrill” gene that occasionally finds even a cautious grey-haired editor like me putting the pedal to the metal (so long, suckers!) despite the risk.

In his tribute to the record-breaking Navy pilot James Roland Kyle, Jr., author Doug Harvey describes the early worldwide fascination with flying as a phenomenon “so forceful, it could not be subdued by the fact that death or grave injury were commonplace among those who took to the air.”